Fable's Shutdown Hands Crypto Its Case for Decentralized AI
Plus, Backpack's SPCX crosses 10K holders and Strategy's STRC hits a record low.
- Fable shutdown makes the case for decentralized AI
- ZetaChain bets on private AI [partner]
- Backpack's SPCX crosses 10K holders
- Strategy's STRC falls to record-low $85
- Ondo adds 173 tokenized stocks, pushing catalog past 430 assets
- Cap Labs closes $106M FDV token auction with 5.5x oversubs
- AetherStrike tokenizes material holding US infra together [partner]
Anthropic's most powerful public model came with guardrails users called too broad, then the US government switched Fable off entirely. A single political decision flipping access to frontier AI off for every user on the platform. The shutdown has provided crypto with its sharpest case yet for decentralized AI. Traders have started bidding the bet up; NEAR, Bittensor, Render, and other AI tokens all rallied on the news.
Last week at The Defiant Live, Jake Brukhman (CoinFund) made the argument that the shift from impossible to expensive to viable is already happening for permissionless AI; while Jesus Rodriguez (Sentora, The Sequence) argued centralized labs would always run faster. The Fable shutdown doesn't decide the technical race. It does decide the political one: customers who can't tolerate that an administration can switch their AI off now have a structural reason to look at networks no government controls.
Read more below!
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NEAR's AI Vindication
On the same day Anthropic's Fable was switched off, Camila Russo sits with Illia Polosukhin — co-founder of NEAR Protocol and one of the eight co-authors of the original 'Attention Is All You Need' paper that defined the Transformer architecture underneath every major frontier model — to walk through the vindication moment NEAR has been building toward. A researcher who shipped the Transformer and then walked into crypto-AI six years ago, on the day the centralized stack he left took its biggest public stumble.
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Fable's Shutdown Hands Crypto Its Case for Decentralized AI
Anthropic's Claude Fable was switched off by US-government action after the model's broader-than-expected guardrails drew bipartisan scrutiny, per The Defiant's reporting. The decentralized-AI token basket; NEAR, Bittensor (TAO), Render, and Akash — rallied.
Backpack's Tokenized SpaceX Token on Solana Crosses 10,000 Holders, Nearly Double xStocks' SPCXx
Backpack's tokenized SpaceX share token on Solana has crossed 10,000 holders, six days after listing alongside the SpaceX Nasdaq debut, and nearly double xStocks' SPCXx on the same trade. The gap follows last week's xStocks delivery failure at Bybit, Binance and Bitget; Backpack's product cleared the IPO without the same logistics break. CEO Armani Ferrante is now positioning the Solana-native architecture as the structural advantage.
Strategy's STRC Falls to Record Low, Squeezing a Bitcoin Funding Channel
Strategy's STRC preferred stock fell to roughly $85 on Thursday, a record-low close and 15% below the $100 anchor the instrument is engineered to hold. STRC is the cash-pay preferred Strategy issues to fund its bitcoin treasury; when it trades below par, the implied dividend yield rises and the issuer's effective borrowing cost climbs.
Ondo Finance Adds 173 Tokenized Stocks and ETFs, Taking Catalog Past 430 Assets Across Three Chains
Ondo Finance expanded Ondo Global Markets with 173 new tokenized stocks and ETFs, lifting the platform's total catalog past 430 assets across Ethereum, Solana, and BNB Chain. The new batch covers AI, robotics, quantum, defense, critical materials, and data-center-energy names, plus BlackRock active ETFs and covered-call strategies.
Cap Labs CAP Token Auction Closes at $106 Million FDV With 5.5x Oversubscription
Cap Labs closed its CAP governance-token auction at $106 million FDV with 5.5x oversubscription: 1,002 bidders committed $16.4 million for tokens that cleared at $0.011. The batch-auction structure prices the token from real committed demand, not a market-maker spread, a model Liquifty and Echo have been pushing as the alternative to the LBP / fair-launch templates that dominated the prior cycle.
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